daniel.haxx.se

The first c-ares release so far in 2009 took place today when we shipped c-ares 1.7.0 and uploaded it to the web site.

News this time include:

• Added ares_library_init() and ares_library_cleanup()
• Added ares_parse_srv_reply(), ares_parse_txt_reply() and ares_free_data()
• in6_addr is not used in ares.h anymore, but a private ares_in6_addr is
  instead declared and used
• ares_gethostbyname() now supports ‘AF_UNSPEC’ as a family for resolving
  either AF_INET6 or AF_INET
• a build-time configured ares_socklen_t is now used instead of socklen_t
• new –enable-curldebug configure option
• ARES_ECANCELLED is now sent as reason for ares_cancel()
• new –enable-symbol-hiding configure option
• new Makefile.msvc for any MSVC compiler or MS Visual Studio version
• addrttl and addr6ttl structs renamed to ares_addrttl and ares_addr6ttl
• naming convention for libraries built with MSVC, see README.msvc

The set of bugfixes done include these:

• ares_parse_*_reply() functions now return ARES_EBADRESP instead of
  ARES_EBADNAME if the name in the response failed to decode
• only expose/export symbols starting with ‘ares_’
• fix \Device\TCP handle leaks triggered by buggy iphlpapi.dll
• init without internet gone no longer fails
• out of bounds memory overwrite triggered with malformed /etc/hosts file
• function prototypes in man pages out of sync with ares.h

As usual, c-ares would be nothing without the fierce and skillful help provided by a team of volunteer hackers. We always need more help and assitance, join the c-ares mailing list and join in the fun!

For many years I’ve always kept up to speed with my commitments in my primary open source projects. I’ve managed to set aside enough time to close the bug reports as fast as they have poured in. This, while still having time to work on new features every now and then.

During this last year (or so) however, I’ve come to realize that I no longer can claim to be in that fortunate position and I now find myself seeing the pile of open bugs get bigger and bigger over time. I get more bug reports than I manage to close.

There are of course explanations for this. In both ends of the mix actually. I’ve got slightly less time due my recent decision to go working for Haxx full-time, and how I’ve decided to focus slightly more on paid work which thus leads to me having less time for the unpaid work I’m doing.

Also, I’ve seen activity raise in the curl project, in the libssh2 project and in the c-ares project. All of these projects have the same problem of various degrees: a lack of participating developers working on fixing bugs. Especially bugs reported by someone else.

Since this situation is still fairly new to me, I need to learn on how to adapt to it. How to deal with a stream of issues that is overwhelming and I must select what particular things I care about and what to “let through”. This of course isn’t ideal for the projects but I can’t do much more than proceed to the best of my ability, to try to make people aware of that this is happening and try to get more people involved to help out!

Don’t get fooled by my focus on “time” above. Sometimes I even plainly lack the energy necessary to pull through. It depends a lot on the tone or impression I get from the report or reporter how I feel, but when a reporter is rude or just too “demanding” (like constantly violating the mailing list etiquette or just leaving out details even when asked) I can’t but help to feel that at times working as a developer during my full-day paid hours can make it a bit hard to then work a couple of hours more in the late evening debugging further.

The upside, let’s try to see it as a positive thing, is that now I can actually “punish” those that clearly don’t deserve to get helped since I now focus on the nice people, the good reports, the ones which seem to be written by clever people with an actual interest to see their problems addressed. Those who don’t do their part I’ll just happily ignore until they shape up.

I will deliberately just let issues “slip through” and not get my attention and require that if they are important enough people will either report it again, someone else will step up and help fix them or perhaps someone will even consider paying for the fix.

Several sites in the haxx.se domain and other stuff related to me and my fellows were completely offline for almost 50 hours between August 24th 19:00 UTC and August 26th 20:30 UTC.

The sites affected included the main web sites for the following projects: curl, c-ares, trio, libssh2 and Rockbox. It also affected mailing lists and CVS repositories etc for some of those.

The reason for the outage has been explained by the ISP (Black Internet) to be because of some kind of sabotage. Their explanation given so far (first in Swedish):

Strax efter kl 20 i måndags drabbades Black Internet och Black Internets kunder av ett mycket allvarligt sabotage. Sabotaget gjordes mot flera av våra core-switchar, våra knutpunkter. Detta resulterade i ett mer eller mindre totalt avbrott för oss och våra kunder. Vi har polisanmält händelsen och har ett bra samarbete med dem.

Translated to English (by me) it becomes:

Soon after 8pm on Monday, Black Internet and its customers were struck by a very serious act of sabotage. The sabotage was made against several of our core switches. This resulted in a more or less total disruption of service for us and our customers. We have reported the incident to the police and we have a good cooperation with them.

Do note that you could keep track of this situation by following me on twitter.

It’s good to be back. Let’s hope it’ll take ages until we go away like that again!

Update: according to my sources, someone erased/cleared Black Internet’s core routers and then they learned that they had no working backups so they had to restore everything by hand.

With a few bug fixes and general improvements, c-ares 1.6.0 was released just now with these new additions:

• support for the glibc “rotate” resolv.conf option (or ARES_OPT_ROTATE)
• ares_gethostbyname_file()
• ares_dup()
• ares_set_socket_callback()

(the man pages for the new functions are not yet available on the web site but I’m meaning to get to that soonish)

Finally I pulled myself together and made c-ares.haxx.se the new official URL for the c-ares project, and to celebrate the occasion we now also have an “official” project logo (thanks to Jeff Pohlmeyer):